“A robot that can carry out the last 10 yards of delivery, getting from a vehicle into a house and putting the package inside the front door. Lab demo: NET 2025. Deployed systems: NET 2028.”
Roboticist; MIT Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus); co-founder of iRobot and Rethink Robotics; co-founder and CTO of Robust.AI
Said Jan 1, 2018Deadline Jan 1, 2028Rodney Brooks, "My Dated Predictions," rodneybrooks.com, January 1, 2018 (called 18 months early in his 2026 scorecard)
The 2025 lab-demo floor passed with no such demonstration, and Brooks called the NET 2028 deployment prediction 18 months early on the grounds that there has been no visible progress in eight of the ten years he allotted.